26 June 2007 1:19 PM

Even the massaged opinion polls can no longer conceal the truth - that the Cameron project has already failed. They misunderstood Gordon Brown, and found that - try as they might - they couldn't conceal the fact that the Tory Party is united by nothing at all, not even a true desire for office at all costs.

I'll return to this, the shift in the opinion polls, later, but I would like to draw everyone's attention to the thoughts of Michael Portillo, early prophet of the Cameroon project, in the Sunday Times of 24th June.

"I have always doubted" he reveals" that the Conservatives could win the next election. Now the question in my mind is different: can the Tories ever win again?"

Mr Portillo is not and never has been my favourite politician, and he is not my favourite commentator either. But I think it highly significant that a former Tory Cabinet Minister, whose view of the subject may until now have been clouded by his political position, is coming slowly to the same conclusion that I reached nearly four years ago, in an article published in the Spectator on the 4th October 2003.

That is, briefly, this. The Tories are an unleadable party based on a hopeless, seething coalition of people who hate each other and have nothing in common to enforce unity in their ranks. Some want to leave the EU, some love the EU. Some want homosexual marriage.

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Others want heterosexual marriage to have unique privileges. Some want more grammar schools. Some hate grammar schools. These are not positions over which it is possible to compromise. Were he the Archangel Gabriel, and he is not, David Cameron could not turn this rabble into an election-winning force. Nor, if he did so, could he govern the country with any conviction. He would be in office, but not in power.

This means that the urgent task is to replace the Tories with a movement that can beat New Labour and which believes in something, and to do this we must bulldoze the wreckage of the Tories out of the way.

The left, instinctively realising what this might mean, have formed a Society for the Preservation of the Tories, and are among the keenest backers of Mr Cameron. This is not just because Mr Cameron has accepted all the policies of the Left. It is because they rightly fear what would happen if the Tories did collapse and split.

I know this from private conversations. But a fascinating episode last week has finally provided me with on-the-record evidence of the truth of my theory.

This took place at a gathering sponsored by 'Editorial Intelligence', called 'Can Cameron Crack it?' and attended by a number of commentators including the distinguished political journalist turned pollster, Peter Kellner, a man of the left whom I have known for many years.

Mr Kellner knows his statistical onions, and gave an analysis of the current state of the polls which clearly showed that the Tory position is close to hopeless. He did not actually use these words, but he pointed out that the electoral system is so tilted against them that they would need to get three and a half million votes more than Labour to win an absolute majority.

He then recalled that on the occasions in the past when opposition parties had come to office, they had always achieved at least 50% in mid-term polls - usually slipping back by 10% once the election came. The Tories have never reached beyond 41%. They have no cushion to fall back on.

Make what you like of that. But then listen to how Mr Kellner responded when I asked why so many people seemed anxious to pretend that the Tories are a serious force when they aren't really.

Mentioning that he had himself been a Labour Party member for 33 years, he said: "I think it's really important that the Conservative Party does survive as a substantial brand, because there will always be a need for a centre-right party."

Oh, really, I wondered as he spoke. What might that need be, and who felt it? Mr Kellner read my mind and continued:" If the Conservatives were to go the way that Peter expects (and I think possibly would relish) I am frightened as to what kind of right-of-centre politics would then spring up...

"One of the great virtues of British politics...is that we have not had a substantial far-right nationalist xenophobic party in Britain. A substantial Conservative Party is our best bulwark against the kind of politics that I think could become very nasty".

The scary language about 'far-right', 'xenophobic' and 'nationalist' is just the jargon that Labour Party people like Mr Kellner use to describe those who want to leave the European Union, those who don't want mass immigration and those who think that criminals should be punished. As for things turning nasty, I think myself that this would be far more likely as long as there continues to be no mainstream party to speak for the people of Britain on such issues.

He is absolutely correct to see the Tory Party as the Left's best line of defence against the development of a party that was properly pro-British and socially conservative - and the Cameroon Tory MP Ed Vaizey, who was sitting on the same platform, did not leap in to disavow Mr Kellner's endorsement.

So there you have it. The Tories are the left's outer line of defence, and the left-wing media's love affair with Mr Cameron runs deeper than you thought. It's not just me saying it, and I am extremely grateful to Peter Kellner for his frankness in answering my question.

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When I learned that 'Question Time' was thinking of having both me and my left-wing atheist brother Christopher on the same panel, I wondered if this was wise. I could easily have squashed the idea by declining to take part. Might it become too personal, and turn into a sort of circus show?

As it happens, I've appeared as Christopher's opponent on other occasions. We debated in front of a sizeable audience at the Conway Hall in London back in 1999, and before that we'd argued about the British monarchy on CNN's 'Crossfire' programme. We've also appeared together on Brian Lamb's excellent programme on C-Span, America's most thoughtful TV channel. Each time we have managed to remain civil to each other, without giving an inch in argument. As it happens, I think the discussions have been fairly illuminating - quite unlike the political mud-wrestling of Christopher's famous verbal combat with George Galloway in New York.

But because of a row we had over the Iraq war, which is too complex to go into here, and has been misunderstood quite enough already by quite enough people, our personal relations had turned sour for a bit, and we had only recently ended a long estrangement. Would it risk reigniting the quarrel, if I appeared as Christopher's opponent on Question Time?

I thought not. I had written a critical review of his new book 'God is Not Great', which can still be found on the MoS website, and he had taken that in good part. We had agreed to do a couple of brief radio jousts, on the 'Today' programme and on Jeremy Vine's Radio Two show. Producers liked the idea, though the similarity of our voices causes problems in radio debate. If your attention wandered, it might take you a while to work out which was which. On TV, the difference is more marked.

So I decided to say 'yes'. The BBC took rather longer to make up its mind - and to those who have written in to ask why I didn't announce it in advance, the answer (which I have often given before, but nobody listens) is that I did not know for certain that I would be on until less than 24 hours before the recording. This is the case with almost all the broadcasting that I do. But if you're quick, you can still catch the programme on Question Time's website.

I think we were right to do it. We exchanged no personal insults. We stated opposing opinions with some force. If the fact that we were brothers increased that force for some who were watching, I think it also helped ensure that the disagreements between us stayed civilised. My main regret is that the subject we most wanted to debate - that of religion - never really came up on the programme.

It will be a while before we do this again. I don't think we could or should do it every week. It would lose its sting and become a performance. And I suspect that those who may have hoped to see us at each other's throats were disappointed. I am amazed at how many people think that you cannot remain on good terms with someone, while disagreeing with him. On the contrary, disagreement is easier and more productive between people who get on with each other - and argument is one of the chief joys of life.

One other point about the programme. Some of you may have noticed Boris Johnson seeking to brush me aside as if I were an enormous bluebottle. I won't comment on Mr Johnson, except to remark on the interesting fact that he is officially funny and therefore cannot say the words 'good evening' without causing a tornado of merriment. But I shall long recall our little clash on the subject of the Tories trying to engineer defections from New Labour.

Of course they are trying to do this, and from the Liberals too, and they are playing some very odd games in Wales. Why shouldn't they? Because it reveals the essential meaninglessness of what they are up to, a scrabble for office at any cost, with anyone who will have them. This is viewing politics from the point of view of the party professional, whose objective is office, rather than from that of the principled man, whose objective is power. Office gained by too much compromise is not worth having, because it gives you no freedom of movement at all.

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I have for some weeks been urging readers to renew their passports, because you will soon not be able to do this without being fingerprinted and placed forever on the national identity register. I think fingerprinting is for burglars, and registers are for sex offenders, and I am afraid that millions of people are as yet unaware that this is going to happen. I don't want anyone to be taken by surprise when it does. If you want to be registered as if you were a cow, and fingerprinted as if you were a mugger, then fine. If not, you need to act soon. Please do spread the warning as widely as you can

The interrogation centres where the fingerprinting will be done are being built and equipped, right now. And at some point in the next 18 months, perhaps much sooner, those who seek to renew their passports will be told they cannot do so unless they attend at one of these centres, often quite distant from their homes. I suspect there will be no warning, just an announcement that this is now the rule. The law has already been passed, and merely needs to be brought into force. The price of renewal goes up in October, yet another reason to get on with it.

Here are some questions and answers which may help those who have not yet
acted.

Q. My passport is valid until 2014. Why renew now?

A. Because if you wait until 2014, and probably a great deal sooner than that, you will have to be fingerprinted and registered forever on a state database, simply to get a new passport, whether or not you wish to have a supposedly 'voluntary' Identity Card.

Q. How soon will this happen?

A. I do not know. The preparations are far advanced and the law already in place. My guess is that you are safe for some months yet, but I cannot be sure. My advice is to renew as soon as your summer holiday is over.

Q. Officials say that this change only affects new applicants and I do not need to worry.

A. This is a confusion of two completely different things. Pay no attention. New applicants do already need to attend an interview. Fingerprinting and registration are a separate issue, and have not yet come in. But they will.

Q. Do I get any credit for the unexpired time on my old passport?

A. Yes, you get a maximum of nine months credit for unexpired time.

Q. Can I do this at any time?

A. Yes, you can. You're the one paying the fee.

Q. I'm told that new passports are microchipped. Surely that means this is all too late?

A. They are microchipped, but the microchip - at present - contains only the normal information written in your passport. Some people may find this objectionable, but it is nothing like as objectionable as being fingerprinted.

Q. Surely, once ten years are up, I'll have to be fingerprinted and registered anyway, and this is all futile?

A. Not necessarily. If enough people renew early, it will be a sign of major resistance to the Identity Card scheme, and political pressure will grow for its abandonment. Also, if , ten years hence, several million people - whose passports all come up for renewal in the same short period - all refuse to be fingerprinted and registered, will the government be able to refuse them all the right to go abroad? Now, and ten years hence, it faces the government with real, effective resistance. Please tell all your friends to act now.

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20 June 2007 10:55 AM

Having spent most of last week in Israel, with some brief incursions into the West Bank, and having got as close as I care to go to Gaza, I thought it would be a good moment to look at the ridiculous falsehoods and self-deceptions which infest the coverage of the issue.

I didn't go to Gaza (though I passed fairly close by on my way to a squalid and neglected Bedouin settlement) because I didn't think it worth the risk. I have never intentionally got myself into a war zone, but I have ended up in a couple by accident, and discovered that I am most definitely not a war-junkie. To put it mildly.

My visits to the West Bank were mainly interesting because of the calls one had to make, on arrival, to local potentates. It would have been extreme bad manners, and unwise, to pass through without paying such respects. These were the clan or faction chiefs, or their representatives, who actually run these places. This is the nature of life in Arab Muslim communities, and those who imagine that such places can become European or American democracies should grasp this. The clan - a form of family link that simply does not exist in Western countries - is the most important unit.

A very good description of this sort of society can be found in a superb and intelligent detective story, "The Collaborator of Bethlehem", to be published shortly in Britain by Matt Beynon Rees (it's already available in the USA). Mr Rees, an experienced reporter in the region, manages to be sympathetic and generous to Arab society and its many attractive features and strengths - hospitality, loyalty, family, tradition, respect for the old and good manners - while being severely critical of its faults.

These include the powerlessness and vulnerability of those - especially Christians - who have no clan to help them; also the absolute power which faction or clan leaders can exercise, and the almost total absence of anything we would recognise as law or freedom of speech, or of political pluralism. Such conditions lead inevitably to severe corruption, a ghastly blight on those places where it exists. We in Britain simply don't realise how lucky we are to be mainly immune from it.

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This clan power is one of the main reasons why western democracy does not transplant into Arab societies. They are different. We have seen what has happened in Iraq, where the division between Shia and Sunni Muslim is also hugely important. But even in peaceful, relatively civilised Jordan, attempts to encourage political parties have largely failed because they keep splitting into smaller and smaller units, generally clan based. A Muslim Arab almost always owes far greater loyalty to his cousins than he does to any party or government.

I suspect that clan hostility and rivalry is a large part of the conflict between Fatah and Hamas, though of course it is not as simple as that. Many of Fatah's leading figures have spent a lot of time abroad, thanks to the long period when they were excluded from any territory that Israel controlled. Hamas is also more appealing to those who take Islam seriously than to the more secular-minded Arabs, who have no great objection to alcohol or to unveiled women. Mind you, moral crusades against alcohol and other un-Islamic things are often used by militants in Muslim countries anxious to show they are in charge.

There is an excellent portrayal of this in the great film 'The Battle of Algiers', in which the anti-French rebels establish their rule over the Algiers Casbah by closing down bars and taking on the racketeers and whoremongers. Shia militias in Basra have been particularly active in shutting alcohol shops, though I am told that a little home-made Arak goes down quite well in many a supposedly Muslim home in that city.

But what is the deep political difference between Fatah and Hamas? In my view, very little. Long ago, before the Arabs of the region had weapons, I remember visiting the offices of many 'Palestinian' spokesmen, including supposed 'moderates' and noticing they all had one thing in common. Each had exactly the same thing hanging on his office wall - a map of pre-1948 Palestine, showing the names of every village and town in Arabic as they had been before Israel was created - and as they hoped they would be again once Israel was gone. It was also pointed out to me that Yasser Arafat always appeared in public with his scarf carefully arranged across his chest in the shape of pre-1948 Palestine. His scarf was not in the shape of the pre-1967 border everyone claimed to want to restore, but in the shape of a world before Israel.

I concluded then, and continue to believe, that no politically significant Arab from the area really believed in a compromise on territory. I thought - and continue to think - that the talk about a return to the Jewish state's 1967 border was just for gullible westerners. They didn't like the pre-1967 border when it existed, and they didn't like the UN's planned 1947 border, even more limited, when that was on offer, or the planned 1937 border proposed by the Peel Commission (which was more limited still).

Well, you might say, who could blame them? Jewish immigrants had turned up and taken their country. No wonder they wanted it back. Actually the truth is nothing like so simple. Many people with passionate views on this subject know amazing little about the subject. I remember conversing with a prominent TV presenter who generally interrogates Israeli spokesmen as though they were war criminals, and asking him what he thought of the San Remo accords. He'd never heard of them. You haven't either? That's no surprise . Nor have most people, but it seems to me that you can't really get too worked up or moral about this unless you know the whole story.

The most important thing is that 'Palestine' never existed as a country, only as an entirely artificial colony carved out of the Turkish Empire by Britain (and France) after the First World War. The borders they eventually agreed on had no connection with the old administrative boundaries of the Turkish Empire, or with the Roman province of 'Palestine' from which the name was borrowed.

To begin with, British 'Palestine' included all of what is now Jordan, right up to the Iraq border, what is now called the 'West Bank' plus Gaza and the Golan Heights, and much of this area was originally designated for Jewish settlement under the 1917 Balfour declaration in which Britain pledged to create a 'national home for the Jews'. Note it was to be a 'national home'. Nothing was said about statehood, and it wasn't intended to be a Jewish State. The word 'Palestinian', used before 1948, meant anyone, Jewish or Arab, living in the colony ( or 'mandate' as we had to call it, thanks to the early political correctness of the day). The newspaper now called the 'Jerusalem Post' was called the 'Palestine Post'.

Arabs now living in Israel (or Gaza, or the West Bank) will tell you that they are closely related to Arabs in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan - and this is not just because refugees from the Israelis fled to these places in 1948, though they did. It is because the real Arab nationality in this area is far wider than the clans living in Israel, the West Bank or Gaza. In fact, if Israel did not exist, the most likely event would be the gradual emergence of a 'Greater Syria' including present-day Syria, Jordan and the territory now held by Israel.

This region was originally carved up by the secret Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement made during the First World War, a classic piece of Great Power cynicism (Britain had earlier made promises to the Arabs which conflicted with it) . It was then re-carved once the war was over, and the original plans went badly wrong. Britain had wanted to install its ally, Faisal, on the throne of Syria. But the French didn't want him. So we gave him Iraq instead, another invented country whose foundation has led to endless problems. This left his brother, Abdullah, disappointed - since we had promised Iraq to him and he now had no throne on which to sit, and became angry.

This led to the invention of what was then called Transjordan, whose territory was simply taken away from the original 'mandate' as a consolation gift to Abdullah. Thus, before it had even begun, the 'National Home' had shrunk hugely in size.Everything West of the Jordan river, right to the Iraqi border, was gone. By the way, the 'West Bank' was seized by Transjordan in the 1948 war, and then annexed. The seizure and annexation were just as illegal as Israel's later seizure of the same patch, and its annexation of East Jerusalem. But Britain, which has fastidiously refused to recognise Israel's action, recognised Jordan's annexation. And nobody made much of a fuss about it during the 19 years the West Bank was ruled by Jordan. Nor, interestingly enough, did any major Arab figure take advantage of Jordan's long ownership of the area to visit the Dome of the Rock or the Al Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem, which are often alleged to be the 'third holiest site in Islam'.

The Golan Heights - whose annexation by Israel we also refuse to recognise - were originally partly in British Palestine and had they remained there would presumably have belonged to Israel after 1948. But we had handed them over to the French in 1923 in return for a shift in the frontier on the Sea of Galilee, so they ended up in Syria instead.

The story of what follows, by no means inevitable, is largely the result of British indecision about who we wanted to please most, and of factional conflicts in the British government, over the 'National Home'. British endorsement,. as official leader of the area's Arabs, of the fiercely anti-Jewish Haj Amin al-Husseini (who ended up recruiting SS soldiers for Hitler) made a delicate situation far, far worse and in my view is to blame for much of the tragedy that has followed.

I mention these facts simply to point out that the events leading to the foundation of Israel are not a simple story of one group taking a sovereign country from another group, or of one group always being in the right and one always in the wrong. Both have engaged in massacres, both have used terror. Both have also performed actions of kindness, tolerance, mercy and generosity.

Jews as well as Arabs had in any case lived in the area from time immemorial. As recently as the 1920s, empires were still looked on as normal in Western countries, and it seemed quite reasonable for the victors to parcel out territory captured from another empire, without paying much attention to the wishes of the inhabitants.

Britain gained worldwide Jewish support (especially in the USA) for its war effort in 1917 by offering to establish a national home. It was also useful in persuading the League of Nations to give us control of a valuable piece of land on the Mediterranean coast, including the naval port of Haifa. It gave us an overland route to India, and a chain of airbases. Even more crucially, it allowed us to control one of the key land approaches to the Suez canal, the windpipe of the empire.

But those rules of imperialism were already changing even then, and were to change far more in the 40 years that followed. It always makes me smile that the most influential 'anti-colonialist' power was the USA, which is itself a huge land empire obtained by conquest, ethnic cleansing and purchase - but which had the good sense to be all lumped together in one place, rather than scattered round the globe like its rivals.

Long study of what happened in British Palestine and afterwards has convinced me that both Jews and Arabs have a great deal of right on their side, and the two cases both have much to be said for them. Both have also been guilty of grave crimes against each other. Though I would add that the argument, often made, that there is no reason why Arabs should be asked to make recompense for the anti-Jewish Holocaust is not correct. The behaviour of Al Husseini was pretty appalling and undoubtedly contributed to the deaths of many European Jews, denied the chance to escape thanks to Husseini's actions.

You might well argue that there is at least as good a case for the establishment of a Jewish State in Bavaria or the Austrian Tyrol as in the Middle East. If not a better one, in all justice. And interestingly enough the Germans are the one people whose large-scale ethnic cleansing (from Poland, the Czech Lands and East Prussia between 1945 and 1948) nobody seems to mind about. But life is not so neat. Thanks to Balfour, and Sykes Picot, and to the original Zionist settlements, and to the continuous presence of Jews in Jerusalem and Hebron for thousands of years, Israel ended up where it is and we are stuck with it.

And the sensible thing to do, given the powerful cases of both camps, would surely be a compromise, involving the removal of Jewish settlements in the West bank and the final compensation and generous resettlement of the refugees, as full citizens of neighbouring Arab countries.. But let us go back to those maps and to Yasser's scarf.

There has never really been any Arab interest in a permanent compromise. Palestinian nationalism did not become a real issue until after the Arab armies had been defeated in 1967, and did not really get off the ground until they were defeated again in 1973.

Offered the semblance of a national state, which a serious nationalist would have seized on as a starting-point for further negotiations, Yasser Arafat broke off talks and soon afterwards returned to violent confrontation on the feeble pretext of Ariel Sharon's visit to the Old City of Jerusalem. Arafat was happier to be at war. He knew that the rest of the Arab world would be appalled by anything that looked like a permanent peace. It is perfectly true that the offer was not very attractive. But it has always been rather hard to see how a Palestinian State, even if it contained the whole of the West Bank, without any Jewish settlements or access, and Gaza, could be economically or politically viable. It could only ever really exist as a stage on the way to the final goal, the end of the Jewish State. Palestinian nationalism is surely a means, not an end in itself. The 'two-state' solution, which so many people claim to believe in, would be an unworkable absurdity if tried.

Those areas which Arafat did control under the Oslo deal rapidly became distinguished for corruption and tyranny. The Arabs living under Arafat in 'free' Palestine were in almost every way much worse off than they had been under Israeli occupation. (Christian Arabs, especially, have headed off in large numbers, often to South America, Bethlehem, once a Christian town, is now a majority Muslim one). But of course neither they nor their supporters could or would say so in public, though I have heard this admitted by Arabs in private. Because the point of what was going on was not the improvement of the conditions of the refugees, who are pawns, not players, but the undermining and eventual removal of a Jewish-run state in the Middle East.

Maybe at some stage the Western powers could have stood up against this and insisted on a final deal that left Israel in place, fully recognised, and which also properly compensated the refugees of 1948, as well as withdrawing the Jewish settlers from the West Bank . But long ago, back in the days of Haj Amin al Husseini, they began to play both ends against the middle for their own ends rather than those of the inhabitants.

And, since the West became so dependent on Arab and Iranian oil, the game has been still more rigged and devious. Those who believe that the USA is or always has been a reliable and unfailing friend of Israel should check up on the actions of such Presidents and Secretaries of State as Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, George Bush the First and James Baker. It isn't, and never has been, that simple. America's relationship with Saudi Arabia is in fact just as close, if not closer.

And when the current pointless nonentity has finally departed the White House, I expect we will see some pretty powerful pressure from Washington on Israel, pressure that will not be designed to lead to a final, permanent compromise over territory, but which will instead continue the gradual isolation and weakening of Israel which will, in my view, eventually bring about its absorption in a larger, Arab-dominated state.

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Readers of my Mail on Sunday column will already have been nagged by me to renew their passports, so as to avoid being fingerprinted, like criminals or registered like sex offenders. I would like to repeat this urgent warning here.

Fingerprinting and registration will become compulsory for passport renewal some time in the next 18 months - I do not know exactly when, but I do not expect there will be much - if any- warning. The interrogation centres where this will happen are now being built and equipped. You may renew at any time, without giving any reason. You will get a maximum of nine months credit for time unexpired on your existing passport. You will also save money, as the fees are shortly to rise, mainly to pay for the grotesque, unwanted identity card scheme.

Please tell as many people as possible. I hate to think that anyone will be caught unawares by this sneaky plan, and a large number of early renewals will be a powerful and effective protest against the Big Brother state.

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The sinister interference of the state in private life grows more frightening each day. On Friday - when nobody was paying much attention - the creepily-titled 'Minister for Children', Beverley Hughes, announced yet another 'review' of the law on parents smacking children.

The 'Children's Commissioner for England', another official whose very existence is worrying and who is called 'Sir Al' Aynsley Green, called for the current rule, which allows smacking as a 'reasonable punishment' to be dropped. His office described smacking as 'hitting', as anti-smacking fanatics always do. The words describe two completely different kinds of blow, delivered under different circumstances and for different purposes.

The use of the word 'hitting' by the anti-smackers is deliberately designed to blur the boundaries between violence used for a good purpose, and violence used for a bad purpose. But if we really believed that violence could never be used for good, then we would not employ a police force or an army. And anyone can tell the difference between a blow to a vulnerable part of the body by a closed fist, and an open-handed smack intended to shock but not to harm. Yet the law - if these people have their way - will treat both as the same.

I think I can promise you that this law, when it finally takes shape, will not prevent the torture and murder of children such as Victoria Climbie, who will be left as unprotected as they are now. What will happen will be that a parent who smacks her child on a bus for misbehaving will be reported by her fellow-passengers, arrested, fingerprinted, photographed, DNA-swabbed, publicly shamed, placed on some register and heavily fined.

I expect that this first victim will be carefully chosen, a thoroughly middle-class, respectable person. I suspect that nobody will dare prosecute the parents who really are brutal to their children. They will be afraid to do so, and such people don't fear the law anyway.

And that will be that. A simple, harmless and effective method of putting a limit on bad behaviour will be gone for good, and the next 30 or 40 years will see an increase in the number of selfish, undisciplined little monsters, growing into larger monsters as the years go by. And we will wonder why we live in a more inconsiderate, cruel and violent society.

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12 June 2007 8:53 AM

I am away this week, but thought it a good opportunity to air a question that has been worrying me for some time, ever since I noticed that the old British Colony of Hong Kong was - by comparison with all its surroundings - refreshingly free, but not really very democratic.

And my interest was sharpened by the recent news from the Kingdom of Bhutan, which seemed to show that the people of that beautiful, largely unspoiled country are not terribly interested in their King's plan to turn them into a parliamentary democracy. Not to mention recent developments in Iraq, where democracy has led to national breakdown and civil war, or to several other Arab countries - including Egypt and Syria, where 'elections' held for the sake of form, merely confirm the power of ruthless governing elites.

And we have to ask ourselves whether we in the Europeanised parts of the world would actually cheer very loudly if democracy did triumph in the Arab world, where Islamist parties of the 'Muslim Brotherhood' type would be the most likely to win. The 'West' certainly wasn't wild about democracy in Algeria, when it threatened to bring an Islamist government to power. As for Iran, the middle class there would certainly be very pro-Western. But could it get a parliamentary majority against Islamic zealotry?

But that's only part of the problem. We like to preach democracy to others. How much are we really attached to the rule of the people ourselves?

I don't think we are, very. The governing elites of the 'democracies' have built elaborate defences against true democracy, which they are afraid of, often with reason. In the USA, there is of course the Supreme Court, America's liberal House of Lords, which is in charge of social and moral legislation and has a very sketchy relationship with the ballot box. There are also the many one-party cities, where there is no serious chance of a change of local government, and the bosses have a lot of influence over how the national vote goes in their state.

The original plan of Washington DC was designed to make the capital easy to defend against mobs (the same, interestingly, is true of 19th century Moscow and 19th century Paris). The US capital - and Capitol - were sited in Washington, miles from anywhere to begin with, so as to keep it safe from the dangerous mob of Philadelphia. In Germany, all the political parties agree about everything important, and often have 'Grand Coalitions' which stifle dissent so German voters - for instance - never had a chance to pronounce on the plan to abolish the Deutsche Mark and join the Euro. This was unpopular with Germans, but popular with their elite. Guess who won?

But in Britain the barriers against democracy are even more elaborate. Left-wingers like to pretend, absurdly, that the problem is the monarchy, an almost wholly powerless and vestigial thing which would certainly destroy itself if it ever positively blocked the action of an elected government. It's true that, as Parliament becomes more and more lifeless, a quick-witted and cunning monarch might be able to regain some of the throne's lost power. But the obstacles to democracy come from other places - the unelected Presidency that is growing in Downing Street, the decree-issuing European Commission and the mighty European Court of Justice in Luxembourg - and its cousin, the Human Wrongs court in Strasbourg. Increasingly, the United Nations and its various Charters and declarations restrict what we believe we can do. Service chiefs are deeply worried by War Crimes law, and politicians ought to be. Yet there was no such law before 1945, in reality.

But in many ways the greatest obstacles to the power of the voters are the political parties, which have become entrenched corporations, dedicated to keeping themselves alive, and relishing the chance - handed to them by the EU and by devolution - to introduce horrible list systems which give them even more of a veto over who sits in legislatures than they had before. How long before the list system comes to Westminster? Not long, I think. I've been into this in my examination of the Useless Tories, so I won't go on at length about it here.

How much does it matter? I'm torn. I'm not convinced at all that a half-informed electorate are the right people to take great national choices. In 1975, they were deceived into voting to stay in the Common Market, and in 1997 they were deceived into voting for New Labour. Perhaps worst of all. in October 1933, in a by-election in East Fulham, London, they voted for a Labour 'peace' candidate who opposed rearmament. Remember, this was months after Hitler had come to power in Berlin, and his warlike intentions were quite obvious. Yet the pro-rearmament Tory Duff Cooper had to take refuge in Fulham town hall, to protect himself from the rage of a pro-'peace' mob. His offence was to suggest that the Royal Air Force should be expanded.

If you have seen David Lean's enjoyable and intelligent 1944 film of Noel Coward's 'This Happy Breed', you will probably have noticed the camera linger on Tory election posters from the 1935 general election, not long after the Fulham result had frightened the Tory leadership. They show the Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, looking avuncular and reassuring, above the words "I will never stand for a policy of great armaments'. Thus, for fear of 'democracy', the Tories stood in 1935 on a policy which amounted to national suicide. Their failure to rearm in time changed the course of history. Not many people know, for instance, that the lack of a single aircraft carrier to protect the great ships 'Prince of Wales' and 'Repulse' almost certainly cost us Singapore, and therefore the whole empire. As for the Battle of Britain, it was the most close-run thing since Waterloo. The planes, and the pilots, were only just adequate. Readers of this blog should by now also know the shameful story of the popular (and Royal) welcome for Neville Chamberlain when he came back from shameful defeat at Munich in 1938, and pretended it was a triumph. Indeed, worse, he believed it was.

On the other hand, there's no doubt that an elite, however benevolent and intelligent, can become wholly cut off from the true conditions and concerns of the people. I think the absurd complacency of the government about crime and disorder is an example of this, as is the political class's inability to grasp just how bad the state schools are.

Democratic mechanisms are an important way of ensuring that these complaints are heard - provided the parties are open to new ideas and prepared to transmit them upwards. But the whole development of spin doctoring has been designed to make sure that the people are persuaded to want what the parties plan to do anyway, or are distracted by 'manipulative populism' - the pretence of decisive action on such things as crime, while the real liberal agenda carries on in the background, unobserved. I am sure that comprehensive schooling, by depriving many people in the middle levels of society of a proper historical and political education, has made manipulation easier.

The real danger, and the real problem, is this. Democracy - in a world where terrorism is frequent and crime and disorder are serious - can easily become the deadly enemy of freedom and justice. Politicians such as Charles Clarke (who actually ought to know better, since he is an intelligent and knowledgeable person) and John Reid (who is what he looks like) do not hesitate to use the fear of crime, and of terror, to scare the population into accepting the end of Habeas Corpus and the creation of an arbitrary state not seen in this country since the 17th century. It is frightening to see how successful they are.

People go on about how our forebears 'fought' for democracy, and I have to say I see little evidence of that. Politicians have been pretty willing to hand over the vote once they realised how easy it was to manipulate people. But our ancestors certainly fought for liberty under the law. Not far from where I live is the memorial to John Hampden, whose stand against King Charles I was genuinely heroic, and helped secure liberty in this country. Not long afterwards, he died in battle for his beliefs. Yet most people nowadays haven't even heard of him.

The whole long story of the struggle for free speech and a free press, for jury trial and Habeas Corpus, for the Right to Bear Arms (yes, we have it) for protection against the billeting of soldiers or searches of our houses, is a very inspiring and touching one, involving many acts of determined bravery by plain, dutiful people. Macaulay's history of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which a courageous jury saved us from despotism - is as thrilling and instructive now as it was when it was written. The politicians of the time were, in most cases, as cowardly and devious as those of today. But the cores of the English people were wedded to liberty and national independence (which cannot be separated).

The victory of liberty in 1688 would probably not have been possible without the tragic sacrifice, a few years before, of many honest English lives at the Battle of Sedgemoor, and the barbarous repressions visited on the survivors.

There's a still-enjoyable fictional account of this half-forgotten event in Arthur Conan Doyle's historical novel 'Micah Clarke', which describes with honesty and humour the kind of men who we used to be. None of these people was fighting for democracy, or would have much fancied the idea had it been suggested to them. I suspect the founding fathers of the USA would have felt much the same. It was liberty they were after. And they achieved it. We, their inheritors, now have the more complicated task of making sure we hand on this wonderful legacy to our children, undamaged. If we are to do so, I think we would be wise to see democracy as a mixed blessing to be treated with caution, not as a glorious end in itself. Freedom under the law is the thing we should aim for above all.

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04 June 2007 11:04 PM

As I expected, by Sunday evening my e-mail inbox was throbbing with angry messages denouncing me for casting doubt on the existence of 'dyslexia' in my Mail on Sunday column. As I expected, almost all these messages were roughly the same, telling me how ignorant and horrible I am, urging me to do 'research', as if I hadn't done, and asserting as fact that the writer ( or the writer's child) suffered from 'dyslexia' and that it therefore existed. Do people really not grasp that this isn't proof? One mother rang me up and peremptorily demanded that I prove that 'dyslexia ' doesn't exist. All accused me of ignorance, some of personal cruelty.

Several, baselessly, accused me of mocking or otherwise criticising the children who have been classified as 'dyslexic'. Some correspondents severely and misleadingly misquoted Professor Julian Elliott, whose remarks in the Times Educational Supplement sparked off my article. I'll deal with that later.

It is amazing how you can mesmerize so many people into accepting that something is scientifically proven by conferring a pseudo-scientific name, packed with Greek or Latin expressions, on that something. Once it has such a name, its defenders tend to believe that there is no longer any need to explain or justify it. They demand that I somehow disprove its existence, when it is up to them to prove that it exists, since they are the ones who urge that highly-expensive and questionable public policy, diverting resources and attention from the real problem, should be based on the idea that it exists.

And yet, like its cousin 'ADHD', 'dyslexia' is a vague, subjective thing. There is no single agreed diagnosis, let alone an objective one. There are at least 28 different descriptions of it. Many of its supporters believe it involves such things as 'reversing' letters, which others say are not symptoms of it at all.

Above all, it is 'treated' by methods which would work equally well on anyone who couldn't read properly. Go, I beg and urge you, to the website of the British Dyslexia Association and study the list of supposed 'indications'. Well, I know of children who have displayed most of these, at one time or another, and have learned to read without any difficulty at all. I suspect I was one of them. The "I think I might be dyslexic" checklist for adults is also pretty alarming, if you believe in this stuff. Does the fact that I almost always type 'dyslexia' as 'dylsexia' mean I might be 'dyslexic'? Or does it just mean that I cannot type? Let us thank heaven nobody has devised a pill for 'dyslexia' .

Virtually none even began to deal with my counter-assertion, that 'dyslexia' has grown hugely as a problem since schools abandoned the systematic teaching of reading according to the method which is known to work ( and has been known to work for centuries) nowadays known as 'synthetic phonics. The curious decision of teachers to abandon this method in the middle of the 20th century was analysed more than 50 years ago in Rudolf Flesch's best-selling, powerful 1955 book 'Why Johnny Can't Read'.

Flesch's argument, for the immediate resumption of teaching by phonics, was largely ignored by the teaching profession in Britain and America until very recently - when undeniable research in Clackmannanshire made it impossible to ignore the truth. It showed that Synthetic Phonics (SP) was highly effective in teaching children to read.

But even then, many British schools( I am not sure of the current state of affairs in North America) continue to resist. Where they do use synthetic phonics, they often use it only as part of a 'mixture of methods', which simply confuses the children.

It is interesting, in that case, to note that advocates of the existence of 'Dyslexia' say quite openly that one of the (many) theories of 'Dyslexia', (and here I quote their own pseudo-scientific language from the largely pro-'Dyslexia' entry on Wikipedia) "stems from a deficit in phonological processing or difficulty in recognizing that spoken words are formed by discrete phonemes (for example, that the word CAT comes from the sounds [k], [æ], and [t]).

As a result, affected individuals have difficulty associating these sounds with the visual letters that make up written words. Key studies of the phonological deficit hypothesis include the finding that the strongest predictor of reading success in school-age children is phonological awareness, and that phonological awareness instruction can improve reading scores in children with reading difficulties."

Oddly enough, that is a pretty accurate description of precisely what SP does - breaking down the sounds in the language, and associating them with the letters that express them. To that extent - and to that extent only - I agree with the 'dyslexia' lobby. Some children will not learn to read unless they are taught using SP.

Others will mysteriously and miraculously learn to read however badly they are taught. There is therefore an argument that some children learn in different ways, which may betoken a physical difference. This explains why some children emerge from bad schools able to read, whereas their brothers and sisters may go to the same school and come out functionally illiterate. But if all were taught SP properly, all would learn to read. The teaching of SP certainly won't harm those who don't need it to learn how to connect letters with sounds.

However, this difference is not necessarily a disability, especially since teaching with SP puts it right. It is just a difference, a difference made much more important by a major failure of teaching in our schools, affecting a significant minority of children who are thereby stuck with a disadvantage for their whole school career, and possibly for life. You might suggest, therefore , that 'dyslexia' is the product of the bad teaching of a significant minority of children.

How would a sensible society deal with this? Many teachers and many parents know perfectly well, from experience, that there are some children, especially those who have been read to a lot at home, who pick up reading skills by a sort of magic, and don't need to learn systematically. These will survive even the most terrible reading teaching, the worst of which relies on children remembering the shapes of words, and is tested by getting them to 'read' passages they have effectively memorised.

But the large number who do need phonics teaching will fail and remain more or less illiterate, unless taught these "discrete phonemes" . Thanks to the 'literacy strategy' and the incessant tests and drilling for tests which result from it, many of these will be assessed as being able to read when they can't really, and passed on to their secondary schools to face years of misery, frustration and nightmare - classes in which they are assumed to be able to read well, but cannot. What is baffling is that, given the clear evidence in favour of SP, so many schools still don't use it exclusively. I suspect this is because many modern teachers regard it as 'old-fashioned' or 'authoritarian'. I also wonder, after so many years of bad schooling, if some teachers themselves have difficulty in reading, writing and spelling.

Given that our society is rapidly becoming more and more post-literate, with even the signs on the lavatory doors now in pictogram form, and reading eclipsed as a leisure activity by TV and computer games, the only real pressure on many of these children to learn to read comes from school, and if the school is undisciplined or chaotic, and many are, a lot of these mistaught children will drop out or misbehave, a terrible waste of talent, since often such children have great potential.

This could be why 'dyslexia' is often seen as a middle class problem, since the working-class children who cannot read disappear off the national radar, and their parents are often inarticulate and powerless, or themselves suffering from a bad education. Some of them turn up later in prison, where illiteracy ( or is it still 'dyslexia' behind bars?) is common.

So it is mainly the middle class children - whose parents believe government propaganda about improving schools, or who buy poor-quality private schooling in the sad belief that the writing of a cheque guarantees quality teaching - who get involved in the great 'dyslexia' fantasy. They know that something is wrong. The 'dyslexia' lobby persuades them that it is their children who are at fault. This helps relieve parents and schools of any responsibility for the problem. The children, too, are led to believe that they are in the grip of some force that is beyond their control. This is why so many people willingly co-operate in their own victimhood.

Now here's the interesting bit about Professor Elliott, whose original article was summarised and reported on in 'The Times' of May 28th by Peta Bee.

This is a passage from her report: "For parents, in particular, a diagnosis that their child is dyslexic can be a relief, says Elliot. He believes the diagnosis serves an emotional, not a scientific, function. "There is huge stigma attached to low intelligence. After years of working with parents I have seen how they don't want their child to be considered lazy, thick or stupid. If they get called this medically recognised term, dyslexic, then it is a signal to all that it's not to do with intelligence."

This was misrepresented by some of my pro-dyslexia correspondents as Professor Elliott having described those who claim to suffer from 'dyslexia ' as "lazy, thick or stupid". As is clear from the quotation above, he said no such thing. Nor did I. Yet I have no doubt that among supporters of this campaign the suggestion will be spread that I have done so.

Inability to read has nothing to do with intelligence, and a lot to do with teaching. Nobody is more concerned than I am that children should be taught to read properly, and those who have been failed by primary schools should be rescued as quickly as possible. The ability to read is essential to education - and in my view to a civilised life. But the dyslexia industry prevents a proper reform of reading teaching, by blaming the children for the failings of schools and teachers.

That is why I am so concerned to counter the 'Dyslexia' lobby. As long as this absurdity is widely believed, the real failing will not be dealt with, and huge numbers of children will emerge from years of school with poor, inadequate or non-existent reading skills. The resources and manpower now devoted to 'dyslexia' would be much better spent on bringing proper reading teaching back to every primary classroom in the country.

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In overcrowded Britain, walking along a crowded city pavement has become a test of alertness, social skill, forbearance, and patience. Even if you constantly adjust your course and speed to allow for the movements of other people, which I always thought was the thing to do, the others are often not doing the same.

It is no good to move a little bit aside, expecting the person coming the other way to do the same for you. He probably won't. If you don't veer right out of your own path, there's a good chance of a brutal shoulder-to-shoulder contact. And if it's the wrong sort of person, that's the kind of incident that could end in your having your head jumped on, or , as the court reports so often say 'repeatedly kicked as if it were a football'.

So I alter course sharply quite a lot, sometimes preferring the gutter to the risks.I also say 'sorry' quite a lot, in the British sense of the word that means 'You moron. Why can't you look where you're going?' but which people often take for a genuine apology from me after they have trodden on my foot or hacked my shin.

This has been getting worse for some years, as people have become more and more wrapped up in themselves, and walking has become a rarer and rarer way of getting about. Many just don't have the necessary skills any more. I suspect most of these inconsiderate people are car-drivers, unwillingly walking because they couldn't find a parking space two feet from their destination - but still behaving as if they were in their cars.

Inside a steel capsule, listening to loud music or yelling down the phone, in control of a powerful engine, perfectly pleasant people become monsters of impatience and arrogance, hooting and menacing other road users like 18th-century French aristocrats clearing peasants from their path. Now that so many of them are now plugged into i-pods, or have their heads wired up to mobile phone receivers, they carry on behaving as if they were in their cars, even when they're not.

It's all part of the process by which we are becoming atomised individuals, barely conscious of the needs or even the presence of other human beings, enslaved by electronic devices to a fantasy world of artificial, imagination-free pleasure. This entry, by the way, is devoted to the lady who, ears firmly plugged with headphones, veered diagonally across a pedestrian precinct on Sunday, so wildly, swiftly and unpredictably that all my efforts to avoid her failed, and we ended up in each other's arms. I was in Oxford. I wonder where she thought she was.

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I thought I'd give a brief opportunity here for readers to discuss the God controversy, which I dealt with in a review of my brother's book 'God is not Great' in the MoS.

I don't seek to persuade anyone, least of all my brother, of my own position. It's my firm belief that adults cannot be argued into faith or belief. Only they can argue themselves into (or out of ) such things. By contrast, children - who unlike adults are fascinated by, and curious about the big questions about the universe - are open to persuasion on the subject. In fact many of their questions simply cannot be answered without giving either unequivocally atheist or unequivocally religious replies.

Some people think it's very wicked to take advantage of these young minds. I tend to disagree. They are free to reject religion later if they wish, as many do. In fact a huge number of people become angry with the idea of God at adolescence. But it will do them no harm to have been instructed in a faith. In my view it will benefit them greatly, as well as introducing them to some of the greatest poetry and music in our culture.

If they later decide to reject it, at least they will know what they disagree with, and what they need to replace. The idea that it is 'child abuse' to introduce the young to religion seems to me to be a gross abuse of the phrase.

As for the rest, I think it a matter of preference. If you prefer the idea of an ordered universe with unalterable laws which no power on earth is entitled to break, then religion is for you. If you prefer to think that you are just a rather elaborate relative of the amoeba, resulting from random chaos, and that you can make up the rules as you go along, then it's not. Feel free. But what I find quite amusing is that atheists are not at all relaxed about their faith, and so often try really hard to convert me, and enter this argument under the impression that their belief is a proven fact.

That way lies intolerance, persecution and the inquisition, I'm afraid.